Even in a future dominated by electric power, hydrocarbons will remain essential. The entire petrochemical industry—producing plastics and other foundational materials—uses hydrocarbons as a physical feedstock, not just an energy source, making their complete replacement by electricity impossible.
Economic growth is a direct function of the reduction in the price of energy. Nations with access to cheap, locally available energy are almost uniformly wealthy, regardless of their system of governance, while those without it are almost uniformly poor.
The rise of rooftop solar, local batteries, and on-site generation means power is increasingly produced closer to where it's used. This trend is devaluing long-distance transmission infrastructure and suggests the future grid will be far more decentralized and localized.
For many individuals in the developed world, energy functions like Wi-Fi: it "comes out of the wall" for a fixed monthly cost that is a small fraction of their income. The marginal cost of consumption is so low that it is effectively a post-scarcity resource for personal use cases.
Europe's economic underperformance is caused by a governance structure that is not just indifferent but actively hostile to its entrepreneurial class. This 'regulatory malice' and 'contempt' makes it prohibitively difficult to build, innovate, and capture upside, driving away talent and capital.
AI companies are building their own power plants due to slow utility responses. They overbuild for reliability, and this excess capacity will eventually be sold back to the grid, transforming them into desirable sources of cheap, local energy for communities within five years.
We have had housing technology for 10,000 years, yet have made it artificially scarce through regulation. This engineered scarcity prevents young people from starting families, directly causing the crash in birth rates that poses an existential threat to Western civilization.
For AI hyperscalers, the primary energy bottleneck isn't price but speed. Multi-year delays from traditional utilities for new power connections create an opportunity cost of approximately $60 million per day for the US AI industry, justifying massive private investment in captive power plants.
Incremental increases in material production won't significantly move the needle on energy consumption. The next 10x in per capita energy use will be driven by two main factors: expanding aviation to billions of people and the explosive growth of AI compute, which acts as a 'per capita' increase in intelligence.